Hefty Patch Tuesday bulletin rounds off bumper year

Posted by Virus Bulletin on Dec 15, 2010

No sign of an end to vulnerability glut.

Microsoft released its monthly Patch Tuesday security bulletin yesterday, with details of a hefty 17 alerts covering 40 separate vulnerabilities. Although only two of this month's haul were marked as 'Critical', many others could be used to launch malicious attacks on vulnerable systems.

The Critical alerts included the standard batch of fixes for the Internet Explorer browser, and problems with the Open Type Font driver. Among those labelled 'Important' were issues with Windows kernel-mode drivers, address book, task scheduler, netlogon service, media encoder and Windows itself, as well as several other Microsoft packages including SharePoint, Publisher and Exchange Server, this last being the only 'Moderate' problem on the list.

As always, users are advised to apply patches as soon as they have time to do so. This large batch of patches takes the total for a single year to more than 100 for the first time, according to a Symantec commentator speaking to The Register (here). The full bulletin can be found here.

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